I was ready to order a Cobalt RAQ 3 w/ 128MB, but doing some reading, I'm beginning to have some concerns.

Someone said that anon. FTP is not secure. Is there any way to make it secure.

It has also been said that CGI/Perl is slow. My question is, how slow? Most of my traffic is from a UBB, so Perl is important.

Any thoughts? My site is a high hit-count, medium bandwidth, only CGI is the UBB.

Mike A might be able to shed light on the non secure anon ftp issue. I believe there is one, but I can't remember exactly what to do about it. I don't enable it, nor do I need it. Maybe you don't need it for a ubb site?

Far as the UBB itself running on the RaQ, there is someone running a 100gig of transfer/mo UBB on a RaQ, but I am sure it has more than 128 MB ram. I don't think cgi is slower than any other server, though it is powered by an AMD K6-2 300 mhz processor which isn't the fastest thing going.

Anon FTP might not be a good idea anyway. (may be it is, jusy my opinion)

a) harder to monitor users.
b) harder to control bandwidth abuse.
c) if upload is enabled people could go wild.
d) many firewalls block ftp access.

Of course there are precautions you can take to prevent the above, but is it worth the trouble why not just have a http://www.yoursite.com/download/ directory and use an upload script for cgi-resources.com.

Use should be okay as far as CGI goes for medium usage, it's still a 300mhz machine dedicated to 1 site, won't that be better than a 500mhz machine serving 200 sites, remember a few years ago P120 etc were serving 100 sites, some with cgi, quite comfortably.

Yes and that is what I think of when people say the RaQ's are "slow" with cgi. Slow meaning, not as fast as the fastest thing on the market today. There are faster servers. I know that. I didn't buy a $10,000 machine. I know that. I expect it to perform as good as it can and nothing more. :)